A Weevil in Manehattan
Weevil
They’d taken the dead Zebra’s body away ages ago, but the blood was all over the ground outside the tavern. It was red, like a pony’s. Funny, I always thought each species had their own blood colour (ours was green). The smell was the worst. It smelt like old rusty metal.
“Wanna know somethin’ cool?” Fang asked me, shaking my shoulder. I cringed; his claws were sharp and dirty. “Zebra blood gives you mystic powers.”
“That’s stupid,” I said.
“Yes-huh. I’ve seen it. My grandpa took out one when he was stationed in Zecornica. He drank his blood and now he can see the future.”
Zigzag shot him the hairy eyeball. “Man, just when I thought ya said the dumbest thing ever, you keep on talkin’.”
“Hey, hold on, Ziggy,” Echo said, acting all smart again. “I read in this book I got in the library by this pony, Smart Aleck, right? He says Zebra blood’s crawling with all that weird juju stuff.”
Zigzag was getting all red in the face now. “Shut your muzzle!” he shouted. “That’s just bull dung some rich Hornkies make up!”
“Oh yeah? Well, if it’s bull dung, then why’s it in a book, huh?”
They started yelling loudly and I blocked them out. I couldn’t take hearing Zigzag getting on his high horse and my sister blabbing like she knew dung, again. It was all they did when somechangeling got done in. I just kept my mouth shut and didn’t get involved. That’s what Papa always told me and it often worked out, too.
Fang shook me with his dirty claws again and whispered in my ear, “Hey, I dare ya to go up and lick it.”
I looked at him like he was crazy, which he was. “What?!”
“Go and check if it gives you powers.”
“I don’t need to prove something I already know ain’t true.”
Even if I did believe it, there’s no way I could get even close enough. There was a yellow line set up that kept everychangeling back:
CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS
The two guards were standing around like statues, dressed up in shiny gold armour and always frowning. They were both Hornkies, like all the guards in the city, them and Horseflies. You’d never see a Changeling guard or a Mutt guard. They had these big long spears they used to stick crooks with. They didn’t even need an excuse to; if they didn’t like the look of you, they could stick you, beat you or just throw you in the joint.
They did this thing here in the Six Points and all of Manehattan where they left candles, flowers and pictures of the person at the place they died. I’ve never seen it back at my old village. I didn’t really get it. Mama said it wasn’t proper, but I guess it’s one of the lots of things they do different in Equestria.
I recognized the Zebra from his pictures. He hung around Harmony Square a lot and did jobs for anychangeling who offered. Papa paid him sometimes to clean the restaurant windows. He did a very good job and he was always smiling ear-to-ear just like in his pictures. I guess he was smiling down on everychangeling now.
The crowd was bigger now and there were a lot of folks, most of them Zebras, bringing more flowers and pictures. Some of them were crying and some were doing that weird thing with their hooves over their chests. My brother was talking with his friends while I was with mine and Echo. I could hear them from where I was standing and listened in; what they were talking about was much more interesting.
“You think it was the Jackboots?” Pins asked Thor, who was drinking a bottle of cider.
“No... isn’t their M.O.,” said Thor, shaking his head. “He wasn’t strung up, he was cut up. It was probably a gang thing.”
“He didn’t look like no gangbanger.”
“Didn’t say he was. Probably didn’t give them respect.”
Needles wasn’t really listening. He was busy picking his gross, rotted fangs with a piece of metal. “I hear they’re sellin’ all his stuff tomorrow,” he said. “I can’t wait to get my hooves on that radio of his.”
“Hey! Show some respect!” Pins snapped. “This ain’t the place.”
“Cool it, man. Just sayin’. He had this awesome radio and I’m sure as Tartarus gettin’ it.”
Thor stopped drinking and looked interested. “Did you say radio?”
That was one of the big rules in the Six Points: if somechangeling died and they didn’t have any family around, all his stuff was up for grabs. Thor said it was because the dead guy didn’t need it anymore where he was going and it was what he would’ve wanted. Maybe he had a cool Zebra hat that I could add to my collection. I wondered then if Zebras do have hats specially made for them. Buzzards have their green hats with feathers in them and Hornkies have their toppers. Maybe Zebras wear painted skulls on their heads, like the ones I saw in that movie once? I was pretty disappointed when I found out they didn’t.
Thor suddenly called us over, “C’mon, you kids. This crowd’s getting too big. Let’s go home.”
“Aww, do we have to? I wanna see his body.”
“You won’t. They’ve taken it away. Come on!”
“Yeah, Weevil, they’ve probably burned it by now.” Echo got a lot of dirty looks when she said that. “What? It’s what they do.”
Me, Thor, Echo and my friends had to squeeze through the crowd. My brother was right: it was getting real big and angry, and the guards were starting telling everychangeling to leave, but that just made them angrier. When we were a long way away, they started busting people. Thor always knew when to get when the getting’s good.
The buildings in Manehattan are all way tall, and my tower block in Loyalty Street was no exception. There were three towers in Six Points: Celestia House, Luna House and Cadenza House. I lived in Luna House and my apartment is on Floor 13 out of 20, right opposite Zigzag and his Mama. It was so high up that Thor told me if you jumped off the balcony, you’d splatter all over the sidewalk. He said he’d seen it happen to some changelings, but I reckoned he was just messin’ with me like always does. Why would they do that when they could easily fly away?
In my apartment, I lived with Mama, Papa, Thor, and baby Chryssie (Mama named her after the Queen. She’s all traditional like that). The hallways inside were dank and dirty and the lights were always flickering. They also smelled really bad, especially in the summer, but you got used to it pretty quick. Besides, I always stay inside our apartment and that we could decorate so we could make it feel like we were back home in the Motherland.
When we got in the block, Fang followed us when he was supposed to go back to his own place (he lived above his Papa’s barbershop). He was smiling at me, like I knew what he was thinking. Too bad I did.
“Hey, uh, Thor? Fang wants to—”
He cut me off, “No.”
“But—”
“No! He’s been coming ‘round every night for the last week already.”
I tugged his coat so he’d lean down and I whispered to him, “C’mon, Thor, his Dad’s going on a date tonight. And you know he can’t feed himself.”
Echo butted in between us, sniggering, “Yeah, remember when he tried opening that can of dog food we gave ‘im?”
“Oh, yeah, I remember, that was hilarious!”
The two of them and Zigzag started laughing out loud, even I found it pretty funny when I remembered it. Fang was rolling around the street, chewing on that can of chow open like crazy for hours! We should’ve charged people to watch; we could’ve scored some real Bits there.
“Um, guys? I’m standing right here.” We looked back and saw Fang standing there, pawing and staring at the floor with those big puppy dog eyes.
Thor sighed, “Alright, alright. If he has to—”
“I brought my own knife ‘n’ fork, again!” Fang pulled out his tiny, rusty knife and fork out of his dirty orange vest. I don’t ever wanna know where those have been.
In Equestria, ponies like sitting on chairs at the table when they have dinner. Changelings like to sit down on the carpet with our family with our legs crossed. It’s tradition. I dunno why ponies need to sit on chairs. Our way is much easier.
Mama was making me my favourites that night: chicken and pork ramen, sushi and egg-fried rice. She made much bigger meals now that she got better ingredients from the market. Back home, she could barely feed the family, but now she cooked up whole buffets for everychangeling. No wonder Fang loved coming round to my family’s place for dinner.
“This is great love soup, Mrs, uh, Weevil’s mom,” he said, slurping up his soup with his big, wet tongue. The slurping wasn’t the problem, he just always made a mess of himself whenever he ate, whatever he ate. I've been to those eating contests they have every year in Manehattan; if he had some training, Fang would mop the floor with those guys.
“Thank you, Fang, it’s actually miso. And it’s nice to have you here, again...” Mama said while she was feeding Chryssie some boiled, mashed rice and some of her love. She shot me a hairy eyeball. “Unannounced.”
“I’m sorry, Mama.”
Mama didn’t like Fang a whole lot. Then again, she didn’t like Mutts a whole lot, either. She kept going on about how she didn’t want any of us want to get fleas. I guess she only let Fang come round because he’s my pal.
“It’s alright, Weevil-chan, now drink your love juice,” she told me, pointing at the bubbling, hardly glowing glass I’d barely touched the whole dinner.
I cringed, but drunk it anyway. I’ve always hated love juice. It was delivered to our apartment in the mail by these ponies in grey. I read the pamphlets and they say it’s supposed to give us our “government standard weekly dose to sustain the Changeling body”. Too bad it tastes bitter and it stays in your mouth for ages after you drink it. I liked the love Mama used to gimme when I was little, but she had to save it for Chryssie now. She was a lucky grub!
Echo and I liked to play a game at dinner: see who could slurp our noodles the loudest. We can both slurp pretty loud, but Papa beat everychangeling every time. He was so good he could suck up a whole bowlful in one go.
“How do you do that, Papa?” I asked him and he chuckled a bit.
“Through lots of practice, my son. It’s a lot like back when I used to...” He trailed off, twirling his noodles around and looking like something was bothering him. He got right back to eating. “Well, you know.”
I think I knew what he meant. It was one of those things we weren’t supposed to talk about, especially now that we lived in Equestria. We went back to eating dinner quietly and Mama kept reminding me to eat all my dumplings, even when my belly felt like it was gonna burst like a balloon.
Why was Mama always trying to stuff me up? I loved her cooking more than anything, but my belly was already getting bigger and heavier. She kept saying it was important not to waste food, but why did she need to get so much in the first place? Moms are weird.
Mutts like using their balconies to hang out their laundry and ponies like to grow pretty plants. Me and Thor liked using ours to sit out and have drinks. From where our balcony was, we could set our chairs so we could look out over the whole Six Points.
The Six Points was called that because of the way the streets were designed. There were six streets in total – Loyalty Street, Laughter Street, Generosity Street, Honesty Street, Kindness Street, and Magic Street – and they all met up to make Harmony Square. I didn’t understand why places in Manehattan and Equestria have such weird names like those, but Thor always told me the streets weren’t always called that. He couldn’t remember what they used to be called when he and Dad first came here – his Equestrian was pretty bad back then – but he knew they were renamed after the ‘Elements of Harmony’.
“What’re those?” I asked him as he tossed me a bottle of cider (the kind colts are allowed to drink).
“Ehhh, you’re too young to get it. Just drink.”
I love the taste of cider, so do ponies. They can’t get enough of it and who can blame them? It tastes like super bubbly apple juice. We didn’t have it in the Motherland and when I asked Mama why, she stuck her muzzle up and said, “Because our people are not hicks, my son.”
We sat there quietly for a while, just listening to the sounds of carriages passing through the streets and folks starting fights in the allies. I got up and watched over the balcony bored, until I spotted something that gave me an idea. “Hey, Thor… Hornky!”
“Weevil, knock that off!” he snapped at me. “You wanna get yourself in trouble?!”
I shrunk a bit, poking the floor with my hoof, mumbling, “You used to love playing ‘Spot the Hornky’.”
“Yes, when I was colt. It’s called ‘growing up’, Weevil, try it.”
I sighed grumpily and sat back down next to him, but faced the other way from him so he knew I was angry at him. He probably didn’t care.
Thor was always acting like a big jerk, ever since we met back with him and Papa when I first came to Equestria. At first, he was okay, that’s when we first started playing ‘Spot the Hornky’: every time you saw a Hornky you had to shout it out. You got a hundred points for every time you said it. If you saw a Horsefly, that’s fifty points, and a Mud pony ten points (Echo and I often argued whether Donkeys counted for anything). Me, Thor and Echo used to play it all the time, but now Thor was always busy with his gang and yelling and snapping at everychangeling. I actually think Manehattan has this curse where it makes everychangeling big, loud jerk. When you’re walking on the street, there’s always somechangeling yelling, “Hey, I’m walkin’ here!”
After some time and I cooled down, we started talking about. At first, we talked about the weekend and what we were gonna do. The next Daring Doo movie was coming out and we were gonna be first in line to watch. Then I got thinking about something else exciting happening that weekend, something everychangeling was looking forward to.
“So Thor, what night’s your next match?”
“This Friday,” he said, laying down flat on the rug on the floor like it was his bed.
“Who’re you up against?”
“Some Mutt. They call him the ‘Junkyard Dog’.”
“You think can you beat him?”
He looked at me like I was nuts. “What kind of question is that?” He crossed his arms and huffed, getting all sarcastic, “Thanks a lot for your support, kid.”
I rubbed the back of my head timidly. I shouldn’t have asked that.
“Sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he laughed it off, finishing his first bottle and getting a second. “Look, there’s no Mutt bred that can take me down. When I’m done with him, he’s gonna be the ‘Boneyard Dog’.”
We were both laughing now. You know, me and my brother didn’t have a lot of things in common: he was a lot older than me, pretty much a grown stallion, and he was always being bugged by Mama and Papa about his job and boring grownup stuff like that. Heck, I was still just in school. But there’s one thing we both loved and that’s boxing.
“Hey, you think I’d be good at boxing, Thor?”
“I wouldn’t recommend it. You’re kinda soft for that—”
We then heard Mama’s voice shouting from inside, “Weevil! Come inside for your bath! Your sister is done.”
“I’m coming, Mama!” I got up, bowed to my brother and ran back inside the apartment. “Goodnight, Onii-chan.”
“’night, Weevil.”
Mama was standing in the doorway when I came back inside. She told me to get bathed and go straight to bed, and that she had to have a “grown-up conversation with Thorax-kun”. I gulped when she told me that, because I knew she was cross with him. She must have found out that Thor took us to the scene where that Zebra died. It was probably Echo who told, like she always did. She’s such a snitch!
After I washed myself and got into bed, I heard shouting coming from outside the room me, Echo and Chryssie shared. There’s always shouting going in Luna Tower and you always heard it because the walls were so thin. Echo and I liked trying to guess whose voice it was, like old stallion Metal Jacket down the hallway or Zigzag’s Mama yelling at him for messing something up, again. This time, I knew it was Mama yelling at Thor and I couldn’t help but feel bad. Thor could be a jerk a lot of the time, but it’s cool that he took us to places Mama would forbid us going anywhere near. We were just having fun. Mama, she was always nagging and correcting everychangeling, then again, I guess that’s what Moms are supposed to do.
Mama later came in our room and tucked us in and kissed us all on the cheek. She always did it so we could fall to sleep easier. It worked, too. At nights, the room was cold and I always worried I could hear invaders waiting outside and they were gonna smash the door open and get us while we were sleeping. That’s why I kept a bat under my bed. But then I always thought about Mama and how she’d mess the invaders up easily if they came anywhere near us. She’s a lot bigger and stronger than she looked.
I just thought about Mama and I knew I was safe. I was fast asleep before I knew it.
I’ll never forget the first day we came to Manehattan. Me, Mama, Echo and Chryssie landed in the airship in the port. It was shaking so much on the way down it woke me and Chryssie up and she wouldn’t stop crying. I swear, Creator, I would’ve thrown her out the window if Mama and Echo weren’t there.
There were hundreds of airships in the port, like the ones in the Motherland where the soldiers were about to go to war and there were so many different kinds of people (it was the first time I ever saw ponies for real. I was unimpressed; they were a lot less pretty and fatty than in my books). We met up with Papa and Thor there. I was happy to see them again, but I was gonna miss being the big stallion of the house.
When we first got to our tower, I was so excited by all the tall buildings I wasn’t paying attention to anything else. Thor kept swatting me on the head to get the next box and help him carry it up the stairs as the ponies took their boxes down. They were moving out so we could move in. A lot of ponies were moving out for some reason.
Things got weird after they gave Papa the keys and we started taking the boxes inside. Me and Echo were in the hallway, trying to push this HUGE box full of Grandmother’s old dishes (actually, Echo was watching me pushing it) when Papa and Thor came stomping out the door, both looking real angry. I thought they were angry with me at first, but they went right passed us.
I asked, worried, “Papa, what’s going on?”
“Stay here, son,” he told me in his stern, Papa’s-not-pleased voice. “You too, Echo.”
“Where’re you going?” Echo asked, about to follow them, but Thor gave her steely eyes and she stopped.
“Stay here!”
I really wanted to go with them, but I knew better than to do disobey Papa, especially when he acted all serious like that. We saw a Mutt kid and Zebra kid (they were Fang and Zigzag, though we didn’t know it at the moment) run past us and up to a window. Echo ran up and joined them, even when I told her not to and listen to Papa. She called me to come over and see what was going on and I eventually joined her.
When I squeezed in between Zigzag and Echo and looked out, I saw Papa and Thor and the ponies from before arguing on the street. One of the ponies was laying on the ground and holding his muzzle. It was gushing with his red blood. He looked badly hurt and the others looked so scared like they were gonna wet themselves. Papa was roaring loudly at them and so was Thor, so loud we could hear them perfectly.
“You’ve got ten minutes to get the b—k out of here! You hear me?!”
“I see any of you Hornkies ‘round here again, I’ll snap those glow sticks off ya heads and stick ‘em right up your—”
Echo, Zigzag and Fang were laughing their heads off and cheering Papa and Thor on like we were at a hoofball game. Soon, I was cheering too. I dunno why or what the ponies did wrong at the time, but when me and Echo cheered along, the kids started getting chummy with us.
Zigzag turned to me, asking, “Woah! Yo man, is that your Daddy?”
My Equestrian wasn’t that great back then. Me, Echo and other colts and fillies were taught the basics back in the village school. I was the best in my class, but when I got to Equestria, it was a lot more difficult when you actually had talk to ponies.
I bowed and said, pointing outside, “Hai. And that’s our big brother!”
“He’s cool!” said Fang.
Zigzag nodded in agreement, saying, “Yeah! Your Daddy whooped that Hornky’s rump hard!”
“A what?” Echo asked him.
“You know, that Unicorn.”
“Oh.”
“I’m Zigzag.”
“I’m Fang.”
“I’m Echo.”
“I’m Weevil.”
Papa and Thor soon came back. They told us to stay in the hallway some more and talk with our new friends and didn’t let us back inside our apartment until they said it was okay and they finished checking all the switches and taps. I tried asking what happened and why Papa messed up that Hornky, but they told me not to pry and get back to work.
I asked mama that night when she was tucking me in, she just said somechangeling wrote something nasty on the living room wall and that I shouldn’t let it bother me. Echo, being her useful sleuthful self, found out more and told me the next day what they wrote on the wall in big black letters:
ENJOY THE DUMP, COCKROACHES!
When she told me that, I was so angry I was glad Papa punched that stupid Hornky. I actually wish I knew it then, so I could go and mess them up myself. I could take them; I’m pretty good in a scrap.
So that was my first day in Equestria. I saw my first airship port and city, I met my very first two Equestrian friends and I first learned that Hornkies were baka. All in all, I think Grandfather would say I had a very productive day.
